The mobile hardware arms race is about to get a new super-weapon. According to a blog post on Samsung Tomorrow, the company's electronics division has begun production of the world's first run of 8Gb (that's gigabit, not gigabyte) memory modules designed for mobile devices. The 8Gb LPDDR4 chips are roughly twice as dense as the previous generation of mobile memory. The first OEM product offered using the new design will be a 4 gigabyte RAM module.

Think of smartwatches now like smartphones were around 2008 - despite the fact that the idea has been around for a long time, everyone is still trying to figure out the best way to go about it. In Android Wear, Google is trying to make a super-simple interface based on short swipes, taps, and voice commands... which leaves a lot of users craving more conventional tools. So we've got a launcher, a web browser, a file explorer (ugh) and now a substitute for the Recent Apps menu in Android OS.

Unlike a lot of Android OEMs, Samsung makes many of the components that go into devices in-house. Its chip powers not just Samsung devices, but a large chunk of all phones. Samsung's newest memory chips rely on new manufacturing tech that packs in a full gigabyte of RAM on a single die. That would make it economical to get a whopping 4GB of RAM in a phone or tablet.

If you've used Android 4.1 or later on a phone or tablet with 1GB of RAM, you know things can get a little tight in the memory department. That's what makes newer and slightly underpowered devices like the Lenovo Yoga a little disappointing. Google has decided to trim the fat with Android 4.4 in an initiative they've christened "Project Svelte." This isn't a single change, it's a wide range of additions to the Android API and optional hardware configurations designed to make KitKat run smoothly on devices with as little as 512MB of system memory.

According to the new 4.4 developer page, Project Svelte starts with recommendations and options targeted at device manufacturers.

Yesterday's video for the allegedly "new" Nexus 7, widely speculated to be revealed at Google's July 24th event, was a bit low-fi to get the details. Today CNET has a new image, purportedly from the same source, that gives us a clearer image of that specification sticker on the back of the tablet. There's just one new piece of information that we couldn't make out before, under the "Memory" entry: DDR3LM 1600 256M*16.

While Samsung pushes its newest flagship, the Galaxy S III, out all over the world, a few markets have been rumored to get a version with modified guts. Rumors previously circulated that the Japanese variant of the device would include twice the RAM of its global counterpart, and now we're hearing straight from Samsung that the Canadian variant will, in fact, come with 2GB of RAM. Additional internal changes include a 1.5GHz S4 processor (sorry, no quad-core Exynos in the Great White North), and LTE.

In the endless components arms race of the Information Age, cheaper, faster, and smaller are the mantras that perk up the customers' ears and line the tech giants pockets with cash. The latest innovation in one of the key areas of electronic components is DDR4 memory. The spec is said to reduce power consumption by 20-40% based on a maximum 1.2 volts of power use.

While running at the same bandwidth as its predecessor, DDR3 memory, the new spec will run with up to 40% less power draw.

If you were to come up with your ideal phone, the specs would probably look like those rumored for the mysterious LG LS970 on Sprint. This phone will reportedly have the Qualcomm APQ8064 (Snapdragon S4) at its heart. This is a quad-core 28nm Krait chip with the next-generation Adreno 320 GPU. Since this is an "APQ" chip, that means a separate LTE data modem will be used, currently listed in the leaked profile as the MSM9615.

As we know, the source code for Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" is going to be published fairly soon, which means developers of all trades will be able to download, modify, and compile it into ROMs. A few great examples of this are handset manufacturers (SE, Motorola, HTC, etc) working on incorporating ICS into new and existing devices as well as CyanogenMod developers merging the source with all the awesome modifications they've added into CM so far.

Update: In a new Facebook update, HTC explained that some apps would be cut to allow enough space for the Gingerbread update. Looks like it was all about internal storage after all, rather than RAM.

That was quick. HTC, via its UK Facebook page, has announced that Gingerbread will be coming to the Desire after all. Despite the all but scientific conclusion of HTC's engineers, after rigorous testing, that "there isn’t enough memory to ...